ZOOM CLASS DISMISSED — During the entire 2020-2021 school year, long after the pandemic began, San Francisco classrooms largely remained closed to students. That frustrating state of affairs helped motivate voters to oust three incumbent school board members in a school board recall on Tuesday night. But you don’t need a long lockdown to find voters who are mad about Covid protocols, and a whole lot more, in public schools. The politics of school boards have gone national. These typically staid local affairs have the air of a battleground Senate race. One striking example: Parents in an affluent neighborhood of Austin, Texas — the Lake Travis Independent School District — started a political action committee earlier this year with the goal of raising $100,000 for their local school board races in 2022. They’re not trying to oust anyone. In Lake Travis, classrooms reopened in the fall of 2020. Students don’t have to wear masks. They went to prom and graduation. Yet, pandemic school policy has still supercharged its school board races. The PAC’s goal: to protect two incumbents who helped keep schools open and mask-free, and to win an open seat in May’s school board race. Lake Travis Families PAC parents are worried their school board will be taken over by people who support masks or closures, said Brendan Steinhauser, a Texas GOP strategist consulting the Lake Travis Families PAC. These days, the parents who started the PAC have expanded their angst beyond the pandemic. They’re especially focused on fears that critical race theory materials might slip into the curriculum despite a statewide ban on teaching it. “I do not agree with modern progressivism that claims my kids are oppressed because they are Hispanic,” wrote Christian Alvarado, one of the parents who started the PAC, in a Facebook post. “I want my kids taught how to think, not what to think, with age-appropriate curriculum.” The group is nonpartisan, but some of the talking points are a direct rebuke of Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s memorable assertion during his failed Virginia campaign that parents shouldn’t tell schools what to teach. “It’s a bit of a defensive posture to say we support parental rights,” Steinhauser said. Most of Lake Travis is in a congressional district with a Republican lawmaker. But it has a lot in common with the purpling districts that Democrats won during the Trump years: a fast-growing, wealthy enclave . Now Republicans hope to harness pandemic parental anger — and the latest school culture war issues — to retake the suburban battlegrounds. Voter opinions on pandemic school closures started diverging early in the pandemic, in May 2020, once former President Donald Trump said he supported school reopening, according to an AEI report by Vladimir Kogan, an Ohio State University political scientist who studies school board races. Now, the public is broadly in favor of school reopenings, Kogan said in an interview with Nightly. School board races tend to be uncompetitive, off-cycle affairs. Incumbents usually win with low turnout, a truism that was confirmed by data collected by Kogan and his team from 2002 and 2016. This cycle, the Lake Travis Families PAC is trying to raise the stakes. There is a bond package under consideration to add more schools to the district to accommodate its rapid growth. It’s an issue that might normally animate a local school board race. But the bond doesn’t figure into the PAC’s positioning in any way. Instead its organizers are focused on more polarizing issues — masks and closures and critical race theory — that dominate national headlines to turn out voters in May. While the volunteers are parents in their 30s and 40s, their targets are anyone who lives in the community and votes in a school board race, Steinhauser said. And perhaps not just school board races. “I do think an impact will be that these folks will become frequent voters and influencers in their community,” Steinhauser said. “This is how you build a coalition.” Listen for more: Playbook author Ryan Lizza sat down with Siva Raj and Autumn Looijen, co-founders of the Recall SF School Board campaign, about their journey from concerned parents to political activists.
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